A year in the life of a startup

Mobiety - mobile polls

A year ago, I became the founder and CEO - I received my first documents in my own company. I want to tell you about the product that was created, and share a story about how the idea became a business.

Today Mobiety is an opportunity to conduct a survey in any Russian city in just a few hours. Registered users can:

• create a profile correctly displayed in mobile phone browsers, even if there are pictures in the profile;
• download the list of numbers for sending SMS with links to the questionnaire or get a link that will be sent to subscribers who have paid for communication services through QIWI terminals;
• transfer remuneration to survey participants to a mobile phone account immediately after filling out the questionnaire;
• view survey results in on-line mode, upload data to Excel, share them on social networks.

Thanks to the partnership with the QIWI network of terminals, we can determine exactly where the survey will take place: within a radius of 2 km around the shopping center; on the whole street where billboards are installed; in a certain area of ​​the city or entirely in the area. No research company today can provide such services.


Our solution has already been used in projects of the Public Opinion Foundation, companies DataInsight, Tiburon Research, LeMonti, and others. Here you can watch presentations with examples of projects.
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We shared our experience and approach to conducting mobile surveys with market professionals at various events in Russia and Ukraine ( RIW-2010 , DM Days UA , Mobile Developer Day , II Congress of Regional Research Companies ) and received very positive feedback.

By the way, if you are interested in learning more about how mobile devices have changed society, how new information and social layers are formed, what tools exist for their study and how new data is used in business, come on September 25 for the first Think! - non-formal education in the field of digital. Flacon Design Factory (Moksva, Bol. Novodmitrovskaya, 36/4) Registration and information about the event - www.thinki.ru

At events, there is usually not enough time to tell the story of the development of the project, but I remember how it all began and thank those who supported me very much.

I have an idea

Now in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other large cities a lot of events are taking place, where active programmers, young product managers, investors and UI-designers sympathizing with the process are being invited. If you have a project idea, you can sit and choose which “event” to go to and where to light up first. I'm not talking about start-up contests.

More recently, in the spring of 2010, in my opinion, everything was different. Events were significantly less. And if you wanted to share your ideas with an understanding audience, then it could be done, perhaps, only on StartupPoint.

The idea that I wanted to present was in my head for a long time, and the 2nd Point in St. Petersburg became the dead line for preparing a rough description of this idea. I presented the idea badly (by the way, you can evaluate how everything was). By the 17th Point in Moscow, I prepared a little better. If you have two minutes, you can see . So the idea was formulated. I began to think about what is needed for its implementation. But there was a question that overshadowed everyone else: how to start a business?

Of course, I was looking for like-minded people. It was not very comfortable to do this in Moscow, where he lived for less than two years and continued to work in a large company for hire. I became a regular visitor to various "parties for startups", which took place more and more often.

In early April, signed up to participate in Harvest 'e. People come there with an idea that they have long wanted to implement, they find like-minded people, or even better, a whole team, work with experts and get the project off the ground. However, I did not find a sufficient number of like-minded people and, according to the rules of the event, I had to join the team involved in another project. I politely refused this, but decided to spend the weekend with benefit - to prepare an application for the HSE business competition {10K} . In addition, on the recommendation of Harvest, I did an important thing: I registered with the startup program BizSpark from Microsoft and got free access to the maximum MSDN. Since then, the Mobiety team uses only licensed software from Microsoft.

On April 30, 2010, the final of the HSE {10K} contest was held, where the Mobiety project took 2nd place and received $ 3K and a place in the HSE Business Incubator. So, to start a business, I already had money, an office, licensed products from Microsoft and like-minded people - old friends and friends helped me in word and deed to prepare for a speech at the finals of the competition.

In May, the project had another checkpoint. Everyone who decided to help gathered at HackDay # 4 in St. Petersburg and over the weekend made the first version of the site with a brief description of the product. Special thanks for the weekend of May to Alexander Cherny , who wrote the first lines of the code, and to the head of UseLabs, Timofey Strebkov, who invented the logo, and later the entire interface of the service.

What happened next I do not remember.
I know that I quit my job when everything was in smoke in Moscow — August 9, 2010, and on September 6 I received the constituent documents of my first company in my life.

Little about the plans

We actively sell our services and develop our business. This means that we not only send commercial offers, but also listen attentively to the market. In our opinion, the specificity of new products and services is that in the process of creation they can occupy niches that were not obvious at the beginning of their work. That is why we are looking for segments where our product will be useful and in demand. For a young business, this is (after the option with investments and / or one big customer) one of the effective ways to survive in the market or even create a new segment on it.

At the same time, we are writing requirements for estimating the costs of developing the second release, which will include an updated web-version of the service and mobile applications intended both for the participation of respondents in surveys, and for research companies - personal interviews. Yes, and, of course, we will fix a lot of bugs and inconveniences of the first release of the service. Posting on Habré is one of the ways to get feedback, criticism and tips on improving the product.